Modern computing systems, particularly those employed by larger organizations and enterprises, continue to increase in size and complexity. In areas such as Internet applications, there is an expectation that millions of users should be able to simultaneously access that application, which effectively leads to an exponential increase in the amount of content generated and consumed by users, and transactions involving that content. Such activity also results in a corresponding increase in the number of transaction calls to databases and metadata stores, which have a limited capacity to accommodate that demand.
Furthermore, modern applications have embraced scale out architecture as a solution to the challenges of cost, scale and application reliability and serviceability. This approach offers many advantages over legacy approaches which are typically dependent on using increasingly large and costly high-end servers. However, this approach generally suffers from one persistent and challenging limitation: the input/output (I/O) bottleneck. Thus, the performance and efficiency of modern highly distributed systems may be constrained by the communication mechanism that connects all of the system components.
This is the general area that embodiments of the invention are intended to address.